BETTER LATE THAN NEVER

I did say that I'd tell the saga of The Gimp and The Computer yesterday, but the day kind of got away from me, so I'll just tell it now. The computer simply refused to work properly. It wouldn't even connect to the WWW. I don't know if it was the HP, or Picassa, but it just would not connect. I sat here and thought and thought because I really didn't want to mess with it until I got back from England, but as I really need it before England, I decided to try it on my own. First I tried a repair and when that didn't work, I took a deep breath and did a full reformat/install. It went along just fine until I got to the part where the dialer has to be installed. No go, so I called Cable and they said there was a connection, so I called Barak and they said to call my computer guy. The problem was that IE would not let me type in the addy bar. I looked, I considered, then I opened Tools and changed it to 'No Home Page' and THERE IT WAS!! I got myself connected, called Teadrinker and yelled "I'm a computer god! Ala Richard Hammond of Top Gear who *is* a driving god" This project only took about 6 hours, but, I got it done, all by myself, and the computer is working, with minimum stuff put back in, but working. Thunderbird has me stumped at the moment. I can't get it to get my mail. It keeps telling me my password is wrong. I've only had the same freaking password since day one, so I KNOW it's correct, and OE works just fine with the same password. I'll call Barak and see if someone there can maybe help me with Thunderbird? I'm also going to install the HP software and if things go tits up again, take it back. Now that I've done it once, I'm not afraid to do it again, and I haven't put everything back so there's not much lose! I'm a computer god. So there!!! Of course all that will have to wait until I get the car fueled and a some kerosene for the heater. The first stage of that is to go get another jerry can (on Harley Too) so I'll have more than enough kerosene for the week. I'll get on to the Thunderbird issue when I get back, or maybe after I install HP. I also have to burn a couple of CDs. No, I am not procrastinating, I just want to get things I promised to do done before I muck things up yet again.